Noted: The NIH will also study reviewers? work in finer detail, by analysing successful applications for R01 grants, the NIH?s largest funding programme for individual investigators. The goal is to see whether researchers can spot trends in the language used by reviewers to describe proposals put forward by applicants of different races. There is precedent for detectable differences: in a paper to be published in Academic Medicine, a team led by Molly Carnes, a physician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used automated text analysis to show that reviewers? critiques of R01 grant applications by women tended to include more words denoting praise, as though the writer is surprised at the quality of the work. And numerous other studies show that different standards exist for men and women in a variety of fields. ?Women do, indeed, have to be twice as good to get the same competence rating as a man,? says Carnes.
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